Neon EVM Code Review

TM Ratings – 87%

Review Date: November 20th, 2021

Neon EVM is a tool that allows for Ethereum-like transactions to be processed on Solana, taking full advantage of the functionality native to Solana, including parallel execution of transactions. As such, Neon EVM allows dApps to operate with the low gas fees, high transaction speed, and high throughput of Solana, as well as offering access to the growing Solana market. Neon EVM is a viable solution for anyone who is looking to scale Ethereum dApps on Solana in a developer-friendly manner. To take full advantage of Solana’s functionality, Neon EVM is built as a smart contract of Solana. This also ensures ﬂexibility in terms of updates.

Neon EVM has a high level of decentralization as it is governed with a help of a decentralized protocol and any user can set up Neon Web3 Proxy and receive payments for executing transactions via Neon EVM. Neon EVM is a full Ethereum emulation with gas consumption calculated by Ethereum rules, iterative execution of large Ethereum EVM contracts, and full compatibility with all existing Ethereum tools. It enables parallel execution of EVM (Solidity/Vyper/etc.) bytecode contracts on Solana. It also provides access to Solana infrastructure via Ethereum tools and access to native Solana tokens, registered in the SPL-token contract through the ERC20 token interface, native to contracts and tools made for Ethereum. Users can pay for the services of Neon EVM in ETH or any ERC20 tokens.

Ethereum has always been the leading smart contract platform, thanks to the ﬁrst mover advantage, but also because of the simplicity it has to develop dApps on it. This is the reason many other smart contract platforms (Layer 1 & 2) are natively supporting EVM, allowing developers to easily migrate their existing dApp, for better scalability or sometimes to reach more users. Solana has been one of the hottest smart contract platforms since the start of the year, and the ecosystem is slowly growing with developers building new decentralized solutions on it. However, the complexity of building on this Blockchain makes it harder for newcomers to jump in or for existing dApp to migrate, adding some friction in the process.

Neon solves this by abstracting all this complexity and allows to easily deploy smart contracts written for EVM, without much change, just like Aurora is doing for Near. A few of the leading DeFi protocols already conﬁrmed they were looking to use Neon to migrate to Solana, such as Aave or Sushiswap. Neon EVM source code has recently been audited, giving Neon Labs the green light for mainnet launch. From a technical standpoint, barring any unforeseen challenges, Neon EVM will soon be ready for release on Solana Mainnet, coming handy following their recent announcement of their $40M fundraise. The associated token should be released in December but no details have been shared yet.

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